


Last Resort and Unjust Deserts

by Albrecht_Starkarm



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/F, F/M, Mental Illness, Regret, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-23 21:04:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19158958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albrecht_Starkarm/pseuds/Albrecht_Starkarm
Summary: Even through the looking glass of psychosis and pain, love still survives.  Even when it's a delicate flower kept behind gates and in a fragrant asylum tucked into green grass and weeping willows.Everyone has their despairs.  And their hopes.  And their regrets.





	Last Resort and Unjust Deserts

Walking into the place, it was hard to believe Shady Acres was what its polite and forever-smiling staff with their cringing guilty authority always tried to goad me into calling a _place of comfort and care for the unwell and in need of healing_. Meaning it was a nuthouse. A lunatic asylum. A place where you found more rubber than marble inside the rooms cut into its palatial corridors.

The name would've broadcast it was an old folks' home, a funeral home, or a lunatic asylum, so at least you would've been right after the third guess. When you drive up to the place, it feels like the pan up to Tara in that shitty old movie _Gone With The Wind_. Acreages of grass littered with trees, big old maples and oaks and elms and melancholic willows weeping like widows for their long-dead lovers and even some transplant banyans still pungent with a stamp of curry from the Old World.

Gardens in serene green shadow where you could sip tea served the traditional Arab way, scalding and in glasses tucked into exquisitely fragile golden frames. Or crack open a beer and luxuriate on one of its porches or in the shadowy portico layering its creamy wedding-cake face. It was beautiful, a melancholic and haunted kind of beauty that would've belonged more in a southern gothic where one of William Faulkner's depraved families held court in dapper decadence, rotting on the hoof in crepe and taffeta, insane and syphilitic relations shut away in the attic and screeching their death rattles to an idiot manchild and his house boy.

And the voices checked out. Graceful thick suthuhn drawls so sweet they corroded your enamel from fifty paces. Beautiful generous women with beautiful generous busts tucked into their neat crisp white uniforms. Stockings smoothed down their long legs.

No men were allowed in the place. Even the orderlies weren't exactly bouncer-dense slabs of meat and muscle. They were a little heftier, but still prim and gentle in their mien. You could always tell there was _something_ fierce about them.

And I could still hear the screams floating out of the faraway wards where the really serious cases were kept. You didn't drive up to the place after you hit the gatehouse. There was a woman with a shotgun slung across her lap sitting there, skin like shiny onyx and green gimlet eyes under her well-plucked brows, a vaguely military costume with a crushed tan beret set low.

She always asked me the same question out of perfect ritual with her eyes studying me like a specimen under a microscope: Name, auth number, patient's name and social insurance number, please. Two other women like her, a Neapolitan of white and Hispanic and the black woman, all of them with shotguns, stood around.

If you hadn't seen the gates before, you saw them then. Big sky-puncturing pickets. The women always had hard faces and would give you hard looks, even if you said: I'm the President of Planet Earth.

Name, auth number, patient's name and social insurance number, please.

And then the gate's baleful black jaws would sink back into the earth like a wolf's invitation to a rabbit and I'd walk up the serpentine black path and the world would be at ease again. There were still the women in their paramilitary costumes and anti-puncture body armor black against khaki, but they felt more like game wardens than soldiers.

I'd listen to the birds' watery trill, colorful explosions of them tucked into the trees' shadowy canopies or huddled around the fiery bougainvillea in the heat-blasted gardens. I'd watch the geese's vague distant silhouettes cut their dark little Vs through the darkening sky.

She never liked seeing me in the morning or the afternoon. It was always the evening, when the world was bathed in syrupy clinging grades of tangerine and strawberry and plum like a fresh bruise, when the sun had started sinking lower down the horizon, snuggled up between the trees.

The less, ah, _troubled_ patients pretty much had the run of the place. You'd see them in their serene blue bathrobes and pajamas or sometimes just street clothes, but always with stark bleached-white tennis shoes. No belts, either. And no pockets allowed.

They were usually pretty. Young. Or at least younger than ancient. Some of them would catch your eye, and you'd feel like you were staring into an abyss. There was more pain there than the world could hold and they weren't sobbing and wailing or even pitying themselves.

They just were. The lady that ran the place demanded not to be called Doctor. She _was_ a doctor. Doctor Wilhelmina Lourdes Consuela Alberta Regina Claire Des Jardins, and I would vow on any stack of your favorite holy books I didn't make that up, she was the last dying rootstock of a venerable old Dixie tree.

Skin like polished amber and a quick wry smile and haunted black eyes. Always wore heels when most of the other nurses contented themselves with flats. Always creaking cold creamy patent leather; sleek white dresses or suits like a colonial caricature.

Colonialism personified. Her office's windows thrown open to admit the day, the cicadas' reedy shrill scream and the birds' chirruping and voices floating up from her family manse's courtyard. She was the last of her line.

"Relena, _so_ nayce ta see yew again." And that honey-sweet southern belle voice she put on as easily as her makeup. I'd heard it flat and hard and just a vague twang through the word salad of convoluted medical verbiage.

She stood up when I walked through the halls, through reception with Nurse Jessop and Nurse Chiang and Doctor Metzelbaum-Nkungwu, and followed the familiar path beside the detritus of the Old South. Melancholic statuary in grandiose poise, marbles and bronzes gone to tasteful verdigris and steel armor from the Old Country in a faraway time when gallantry was unwashed men drenched in sickening perfumes and incense on horseback clattering around to the Holy Land and fighting the Saracen for God and King and Christ.

Words like _mobile suit_ would've been as alien as airplane or O'Neill cylinder space colony. I always wondered, seeing those dented old suits, if the men who'd worn them would've admired men like Treize or my brother or even Heero, if they would've thought their brutality was a step too far.

Treize, he always called the mobile suit the knight of the new generation. When I'd sat in his palace's drawing rooms, a fragrant haze of his cologne and women's perfume drifting around me, that fetishistic white gown draped over my skin, gloves hot on my fingers, he'd spoken to me in a way he said he never had anyone else.

When his fingers slid up through my hair, brow brushed at mine, when he pushed so close so achingly close and then it was _my_ burden to decide whether I wanted to kiss him, he'd whispered something he said even that cruel-eyed psychopathic pitbull in a beautiful woman's body had never even heard.

War fills me with despair, My Queen.

Always that put-on deference that always had a quality of sincerity. A Potemkin, maybe. Someone with their hands on temporal power's reins, but always uneasy in the presence of what he'd convinced himself was real Divine Right regality.

He kissed me. The third night I was there, afraid, screaming at the wall, I absolutely will _not_ obey you, you cynical opportunistic sonofabitch! You fucking killed my father; you had him murdered and-

And then he kissed me. I'd never been kissed before. Not once. Not even those awkward fitful little pecks when you're twelve and it's at a birthday party and you think, Well, why not? But I'd never been kissed and I felt my arms giving.

Felt everything sag and his lips softer than I'd thought even a woman's would be on mine. Fingers sliding up through my hair. He'd eased off his gloves and brushed his hot hands down on cheeks and he was a man.

An adult man and I'd had delusions of adulthood with a pistol's heavy steel weight in my hands and that wilted when his eyes burned into mine.

That grandiloquent way he had of speaking.

Milady, if it would please you to hit me, then hit me. I beg this of you.

I hit him.

Dragged back a hand and slammed my palm on his cheek and he let me hit him again, and again, and again. Fists thumping impotently into a broad sinewy chest and his cheeks starting to burn cherry-red with my palms in negative in the growing brassy twilight, the sun a cheap ornament in the sky, and when _I_ was sobbing from the pain he never flinched.

Does it make you feel better to hit me, My Queen?

Yes.

Yes, it does, you fucker. You motherfucker. Yes, it does. You sonofabitch.

Does it make you feel better to say those things to me?

Fuck you! Of course it does! Fuck you and your whore of a mother and your pathetic piece of shit of a father and fuck you and fuck my brother and fuck that Colonel Une with a goddamned piece of broken glass and fuck you and especially fuck you!

Fuck you!

And he smiled. Smiled that gracious smile and asked for my leave.

And I saw the same grace and ease and ego death they call breeding and manners in Wilhelmina's, well, Mina's face. In her decorum. Her office was a living museum of historical knickknackery and weird unplaceable artifacts.

And one I'd know anywhere: A Leo's joysticks set in a twisted slag of metal. She'd Done Her Service, after all.

Killed men and women.

Mina told me that when I settled down in one of the big overstuffed armchairs with leather that felt thicker and softer than the old port she always had sitting on an ancient credenza in crystal decanters made in convoluted shapes like a still life of exploding glass.

I've killed men and women, President Dorlian. If you're wondering. Like your friend.

I didn't ask her why she was the Doctor and my friend was the patient if this were true. That wouldn't have been very polite.

Just like she didn't ask me why I was the President and all the people who'd fought and died and killed for it were paying taxes and living silent and invisible lives or cold and forgotten in the grave.

"How have you been Relena?" Mina always threw out her arms at me. Wrapped me in those lean athletic limbs and pulled me tight to a pair of breasts that looked and felt more like gelatin models of melons tucked into what was a shiny silver blouse today.

A tight black skirt and her long legs unfolding out of it, bare and glistening with that oil-massage perfection she always wore on every inch. Mina wore her graying black hair with an iron magnolia's dignity and beauty, long and tugged back into a high girlish tail over her nape.

Subdued makeup smoothed down all of age's little imperfections.

I was glad I didn't have to hear _Madame President_.

"I'm all right." It was a well-rehearsed lie. What was all right when there were still cities burning hot with the Libra's radiation, when there were still droughts and famines churning regions into parched despair and boiling over with brutality?

But everyone else was supposed to be comfortable.

Pacifism. An end to militarism.

"You look tired, you know." I knew I did. I settled down on the usual chair and Mina did at hers behind a wide desk littered with papers.

"I know." I knew I did. Every glance at the mirror said that. A thirtysomething's face with a sixtysomething's eyes and a lonely bedroom in a ridiculous Presidential Palace I didn't want.

With a job I didn't want.

With an emptiness I couldn't stand.

"There's always room for you here." Never knew if that was serious or not.

"You have a twisted sense of humor, Mina."

"Think about it. How it could destigmatize mental illness. All the great new funding we could get if it were known the President of Planet Earth was a guest here." They were always _guests_. Even the ones there at the state's gentle but firm insistence.

"I'll pass. Thank you."

"Tea?"

"Port." No complaints when Mina uncorked the decanter with a quiet little _thunk_ and a squeak of frosted glass and let two supremely dense fingers ooze into a glass. It looked like blood.

She had one, too.

"How is she, Mina?" The sun slanted sharply into her office's wide square windows. A minor fracas on the grounds was turning into the collision between a woman's glass-cracking screams about the phantoms in her head and doctors' and nurses' and orderlies' soft soothing exhortations.

Mina looked like she didn't even notice. Reclined a bit in her seat with the leather's quiet groan. Sipped her port. Drained it with a disciplined alcoholic's dainty patience.

"What do you mean exactly, Relena?"

"How is she? Is she doing well? Or- or is she still-"

"She's not improving. Exactly. She's stable. But she's not doing any better because she doesn't _want_ to improve." It always sounded like bullshit psychobabble to me.

After all, head-shrinkers were usually crazier than their patients.

And no one was really certified sane 'til they'd gone through the nuthouse's rite of passage and been confirmed by a horde of lunatics with medical diplomas.

"What do you mean, She doesn't want to improve?"

"Just that. Whenever she's close to a breakthrough, she stops and regresses." I didn't say anything. Just lingered on the hot viscous port. So treacly I wanted to vomit. "You understand what I'm saying."

"Yes. I- I suppose so. But she's been here for the better part of six years after that- that..." What was the word for it?

There were so many easy prettified euphemisms.

"After she tried to kill me." But that was the truth. Waking up with her long slender fingers wrapped around my neck, tears boiling in her eyes, big soft breasts the ones I'd remembered pressed against my back the night before that hanging over me, before dawn slashed through the windows and set her off in hard tenebrism like a Caravaggio.

My favorite Caravaggio. A print of _The Calling of St. Matthew_ in my office.

Something Heero had taught me yanked at my sinews by instinct. Slammed the blades of my palms into her elbows and had her collapsing on top of me. A twist of my hips and a knee driven into her gut finally levered her off.

And I'd still needed to crank her arm behind her back. Pinned her there with the hot sun flooding over my naked skin, so fucking cold and with adrenaline marching left-right-left up and down every vein and artery and feeling _it_.

That hard crack of violence.

I could kill you right now.

Do you know that?

I could fucking _kill you_.

Just like I could've put a bullet through Colonel Une's neck and I could've killed _him_ and could've- I could kill you and I love you, do you know that? Do you know how much I love you and I could kill you and step off the balcony and we'd probably both be so happy, wouldn't we?

But I hadn't done that.

I'd heard my voice ricochet off the walls.

_Help! Someone! Help me! Help me! Just help me with her!_

"It- I think it was a cry for help, Relena-"

"No. Swallowing too many aspirin is a cry for help. She wanted to kill me. But I understand." I really did. "I'd... I'd turned her into something she wasn't. I tried, anyway-"

"You- you shouldn't feel guilty, Relena." I laughed.

It was a bitter and poisonous laugh. I knew I shouldn't've done it. I still did. Saw exactly how Mina had to swallow down the upset.

"Shouldn't I? What if you- you took a bird accustomed to flying freely, a raven, a beautiful- a beautiful proud carrion bird and you told it to live in a little cage, and you ordered it only to eat when you let it eat, and only _what_ you would let it eat?

"What would someone say?"

"Your- your lover isn't a bird-"

"What's the difference?"

"She didn't need to stay with you."

"Where would she have run? On planet earth, in the colonies, where would she have run?"

"Why did she? Hurt you, I mean."

"I think it was because I'd finally felt so guilty I needed to tell her I slept with her cousin." It sounded like a shitty soap opera.

Mostly because that's how _all_ life felt.

"You think _that_ would've caused it-"

"She was in love with him, also. They- they have almost the same qualities. The same belief in war's gallantry." The same eyebrows. "He died in battle."

"I served under Treize. I remember him very well. You did?" I caught a sharp glint of _something_ in Mina's eye.

"Did you sleep with him, too, Mina?"

"Yes. Once. A long time ago. Most people who joined the Specials force did. He was- he was very charismatic. I wasn't naïve enough to think I was special for that. The- the irony was that only Une didn't.

"She idolized him so much, I don't think she could've admitted he was a normal man with a normal body. She visits sometimes. She cries when no one's watching. She talks about different things with Dorothy, you know. Things different than what you do.

"Mostly about Treize."

"Are you supposed to tell me that?" Mina just shrugged. Even her shrugs looked elegant. Slow and rolling.

"I didn't know you did. With Treize, I mean. While you, ah, you were his Queen?"

"Yes." I still felt a weird snap of heat in my cheeks. "I- I don't really even like boys that much. I was in love, this- this obsessive infatuated puppy love, with a boy. But I love women. I love _her_. Dorothy.

"I love her." I was glad I wasn't wearing my glasses. It would've felt melodramatic to pull them off my temples and slap them on the table and clamp my palms on eyes starting to burn hot with tears. Those greasy miserable tears and that thick snotty flush in my sinuses. "I'm still in love with her. So much, Mina.

"Sometimes, she doesn't- doesn't even _remember_ how long we've been together-"

"She had a serious paraphrenic break." So matter-of-fact.

For Mina, that was just a sophisticated use of her medical knowledge. Facts to burnish.

"And that's supposed to make me feel better?" I hated hearing my voice like that. I'd always heard it from my dad. My mom.

_Remember, Relena: How you act is less about you, and more about how you want other people to feel._

Fuck **that**.

It _is_ about me.

Why shouldn't they feel how _I'm_ feeling?

I always felt guilty hearing that sharp needling **vindictiveness** in my voice.

"Is that supposed to make me feel better, _doctor_?" Especially that. "Instead- instead of celebrating our tenth anniversary together, I get to see her here?"

"Well, it's- some people feel comforted having a name to put to-"

"To someone who doesn't know if they're sixteen or in their thirties? To someone who sometimes doesn't remember the times you spent together thinking you'd _never_ have to be apart? When you could sit around being pleasantly indifferent to each other, being bored with each other?

"When she'd sit around reading while I worked too much? Or pulling me out of my chair with her tongue on my ear? Or when she'd go down on me under my desk when I had a meeting with some puffed-up jackass on the phone?

"When she sometimes- sometimes doesn't even remember we're lovers? I'm supposed to feel better because I have a name for that?"

Mina said nothing.

Set down her glass with a soft _clunk_.

"Would you like to see her now?" Mina finally spoke and shattered the quiet again.

"Please." I set down mine, too. Smoothed the peach-colored jacket I wore. The puce blouse and the pencil skirt and stockings.

The ones she loved toying with. Loved when I wore stockings for her.

"Is there anything else I should know, Mina?" I didn't want to get ambushed with something even worse.

"No. No. She's painting again." We both walked slowly down the halls to what was a Presidential Suite even in a pile like Shady Acres. A private wing among private wings. A place that was costing me about as much as my salary, I was pretty sure, and didn't really give a fuck.

I'd be putting forward a proposal to abolish currency, anyway. Economics was the last obstacle to abolishing war. And they'd be hearing from my brother and all the other chained demons and demonesses I had, like that nightmare Colonel Une, if someone said a word otherwise.

My heels _click_ ed slowly down the hall, a rhythmic counterpoint to Mina's.

It felt like walking to your own execution. The dread gathered and lathered and grew hotter and more intense but damn if you didn't want that hallway and the dread to last forever rather than meet what was on the other side of that door.

"She's painting again, huh?" Dorothy's wing was secluded. Her room was one of the only two; the one opposite was some Her Royal whateverness. I'd only seen her once. She was lissome and wore her emaciation with the kind of beauty that said if she ever started eating again she'd be absolutely gorgeous.

The door was heavy hard wood. I knew it was just a patina on a solid steel core.

Not even Heero could've snapped through it.

Mina's knuckles were a quiet rap on the panel, as if this were just some ordinary hospital room and she needed to be sure the patient was decent.

"Dorothy, it's Doctor Des Jardins. And a special guest for you." Mina's voice was enough to send me into a diabetic coma. And then she planted a palm on a discreet reader on the wall and it licked her fingerprints and the door gave with a soft _click_.

I opened it before Mina could reach the knob. Pushed it open and almost drowned in the warmth. Even with the windows open, with the gentle circulation redolent of freshly-cut grass' cool chlorophyll and sun-warmed blossoms, it was still stifling.

Dorothy sat there, poised in front of an easel. She was more beautiful every day.

I wanted to slip into the third person.

To say I was someone else. I could just see how much more Relena loved her, even apart.

But that was stupid.

I loved her more every time I saw her. Her slender shoulders bare. Naked except for a pair of pajama pants in shimmery white satin and a bra cradling breasts I knew better than mine. The little mole she had under the right one, so close to where it met her ribs.

Her big nipples and silky areolae.

They way those heavy mounds felt like marshmallow against my pussy when she'd order me to ride her, rock and sway over her scalding body, paint burning juicy streaks over her alabaster skin.

She looked like a porcelain doll.

"Dorothy, it's Relena." I always tried to force my voice into something like normality.

Just coming to visit, you know, until you get better.

"Oh, Relena!" Dorothy was in a good mood, at least. Turned away from a half-realized painting and graced me with her big violet eyes. They were like her cousin's.

Unnatural.

Sharply-forked eyebrows that looked ridiculous for anyone but her.

"Just a second. I _really_ need to get this brush-stroke down-"

"It's all right. I'm not in a hurry." The room looked like a princess'. A four-poster bed whose gauzy curtains were made to be teased by a coquettish breeze. Everything in white. The sheets and canopy and the walls like architectural fondant and the ceiling and everything but the dark time-weathered hardwood floor.

Even the furniture was white. Dressers and an armoire and a bookcase crammed with texts in French and Latin and Greek and English and even some in Japanese, which I'd heard she'd been learning. It was all so much darker than Dorothy's blemishless ashen skin.

I stepped closer after I eased off my heels, set them neatly together up against the door.

Stockinged soles quiet on the floor.

Set my palms on her shoulders and felt her heat crawl through me. The scent wafting off her hair was her usual shampoo. Melon.

Bergamot soap from her skin.

"What are you painting?"

"Isn't it beautiful?" I didn't know. It looked like the old Taurus Noin kept in the Kingdom's hangar. That needful hypocrisy.

"It looks like a... A mobile suit-"

"It's a Taurus, silly. You remember, right? You're not going senile, are you, Princess?" That name.

Princess.

It meant Dorothy was in her post-war petulance. Always hanging around my office, long legs thrown over my desk and finally just thrown over my lap, Aren't you getting tired of this ridiculous _peace_ thing?

"No. Of course it's a Taurus. Noin, ah, she's- she's doing well, y'know."

"I hope. She and Zechs still going at it?" They'd divorced two years ago.

"I, ah, I think so-"

"Their kids are gonna have some _weird_ hair. Let me tell you that."

"I'm sure they'll do all right-"

"Hey, what would happen if Noin had a kid with that Trowa guy? I mean, do you think anyone would know they had eyes? Two of those stupid bangs right over their faces." I laughed. Laughed because I needed to laugh.

Dorothy finished the last stroke. The Taurus' big ominous cyclopean eye's orange glint.

"I miss you, Dorothy." I shouldn't've said it. You couldn't keep the sadness out of words like those.

"I miss you, too, Princess. I'll be better soon, though." Dorothy finally turned. She kissed me.

Kissed me like she had before night turned into morning and her arms wound smoothly around my waist turned into her fingers around my neck.

"You promise, Dorothy?"

"Uh-huh." The door closed behind Mina. Dorothy wasn't much of a threat. Not with how thin she'd gotten. She looked almost like a little girl. The muscle had waned in her arms. Her tummy was a thin taper sucked up against her spine.

Her breasts were still big and soft. Legs still long and shapely.

But her face looked too slender.

"You need to eat more, Dorothy-"

"Getting after me because I'm not a fatty, huh? Jealous?"

"Always." I loved that smile. Roguish and sardonic. "I'm getting a little chubby, huh, Dorothy?"

"More to love." I wasn't. Exactly. I knew I'd probably gained a few pounds since I was twenty. But most of that was muscle.

When you couldn't just rely on a teenage metabolism to keep you in fighting shape. Or something like it. Without Dorothy, leisure time was pointless. So it was mostly spent in the Preventers' HQ gym. Grunting under a barbell or torturing my arms with Une's barking drill instructor guidance until I could hoist myself up on the pull-up bar.

Huffing with sweat slopping down my face for hours on the treadmill. Learning dumbbells didn't need to stop at fifteen pounds.

Even feeling a heavy squat bar slung over my shoulder.

"Wow, there's a _lot_ more to love here, Arnold. When did you start working out?" Dorothy's eyes were always wry. Always sharp and vibrant and it didn't feel possible they weren't a candid window into that soul.

Or maybe they still were. But I never knew _when_ they were. It was like staring into a misfiring time machine.

"Awhile ago."

"Damn, _feel_ these guns. Oops. Am I not supposed to say the _G_ -word?" Dorothy's smile just pulled apart her lips even wider. "Well, the _other_ G-word, anyway-"

"I won't tell." I kissed her. Kissed her with her fingers cinching into my biceps. Felt her fall closer to me, head tilted up, painfully fragile when I wound my arms around her and felt my palms slide naturally to that soft place at the small of her back.

Her kiss was divine. Lush gentle lips. Yielding and still combative and with her tongue flicked first at my teeth. Forging into my mouth with a fast velvety grace. She tasted like strawberries and cream. I didn't know if she'd eaten any and I didn't care.

She always did when I kissed her now.

I missed the first-kiss-in-the-morning halitosis.

The imperfections that aren't manicured date fixtures.

The way only _I'd_ ever seen her hair mussed.

"I missed you, Relena. You know that, right?" Eyes enormous, a little glassy. "I'm so wet. God, you can't begin to imagine how wet I am. Sometimes, it feels like it's been years since we've fucked." It hadn't been.

But I knew the feeling.

"I know, Dorothy-"

"You're not, you know, finding some outside relief, are you?" That pain was enough almost to cool to breaking every bit of the heat I felt seething through me.

"Dorothy-"

"I wouldn't blame you. Having a sicky for a girlfriend-"

"Are you?"

"Mmm. There _are_ some hot girls here-"

"Dorothy!" Her laugh was beautiful.

"You're such a dork-"

"That doesn't answer the question."

"Uh-uh. They're all _crazy_." Dorothy's voice dipped down to a sharp conspiratorial whisper. "Are _you_ , Princess?"

"Not unless you include my right hand, or sometimes my left hand making a guest performance." Even the toys were too close to Dorothy for me to touch.

"Do you think about me, Princess?"

"Uh- _huh_." Dorothy slid away a bit. Reached behind her back and popped open her bra with a quick practiced grace.

"All I ever do is think about you. About how I want to get better and walk through the door while you're still sleeping and fucking _maul_ you. I'm serious." I just watched.

Felt that tightness in my jaw when her bra's fine white lace tumbled to her lap. Her big pillowy breasts bouncing out of that tension.

"God, you're gorgeous, Dorothy." I never _had_ touched another woman, even with the oceans of temptation. Opportunity. A secretary unceremoniously shitcanned after she'd just grown a _little_ too close to that.

Tall and blonde like Dorothy.

It was seeing her from behind once and almost dropping my papers and being forced to remonstrate with myself: This isn't Dorothy. This is your _secretary_ named Louise.

Dorothy's platinum-colored hair settled around her thin shoulders. Framed her deliciously.

I was sinking into her lap like a child. Chin against her left thigh. It was too thin and still beautifully shaped. Tugging at her pajama pants' hem and dragging it down while she lifted up her butt, Dorothy's eyes already a little demented with lust like mine.

"P-Princess-"

"I'm _really_ hungry." How perfectly she hoisted her long sylphine legs over my shoulders. Pulled me close with a practiced ease into that fragrant dripping heat. How she danced on my tongue's fast stirring swipe between lips I'd know in my last dying seconds when almost everything was gone but her eyes and her smile.

Found her clit and sent her into yelping convulsions and felt her fine soft white curls against my nose and inhaled a scent that was only hers. Swallowed it. Gorged myself on it.

"A-ah, R-Relena!" Dorothy's fingers were still so fine while they laced up through my hair. Pulled me even closer while she rode my chin to a sloppy yelping orgasm and now we were both falling back into that princessly bed.

My jacket and blouse and bra off and skirt hiked up 'til it looked like a belt and her fingers between my thighs while we lay together, my breasts pushed up against hers. They'd grown a little smaller with the exercise, but at least she didn't complain.

Too much.

"Your tits should be _much_ bigger, Princess. Really. B-but, wow, you're all smooth down there." I'd just had surgery to wipe it all away. Dorothy always complained about the hair and _I_ hated it, too. My fingers forged between her legs, too, those touches that felt almost juvenile, Dorothy's inside me and mine inside hers tasting that gooey rich heat overflowing with her juice.

I'd always wondered what it would be like when I was older.

If I'd stop thinking in romance novel words like _nectar_ or _honey_ and it still felt like hot honey inside Dorothy while I stirred her, felt that blaze creep over my knuckles, two and then three fingers inside her and feeling her twitch and tremble, all of those velvet coils muscle memory and totally new each time.

Found her spot and she did mine and we just rocked together. Shook and shuddered and she still came first. Like always. Dorothy's brow misted with sweat and her chest running with it and my body glowing and her voice rose and cracked and she yelped and yipped like a little girl, head thrown back and lashes beating at her reddening cheeks.

And I came, too, orgasm building between my thighs and shooting down my legs and arms and curling my toes and transmuting into a red wash behind my eyes. Dorothy's fingers moved faster, harder, pumped with a slick wet sound between my thighs. Wrists against smooth skin and still a kiss of springy fat and hard muscle and the stockings' sheer fabric.

Her perfect nakedness against me.

Backs arching and hair growing mussed and I felt mine deflate with sweat.

And we finally just needed to stop with that nerve-snapping electricity ripping up your body, surfacing like a deep-sea diver with the last bit of breath still in your lungs. Gasping for air rich with her.

She was perfect. I lay on her breast, her heart thudding its timpani rhythm into my ear.

Twisted together. Dorothy's arms around me.

At that second, I wished she'd kill me.

Fasten her fingers on my neck and squeeze and this time I'd just lie there and smile up at her and nod and say, Please. Don't stop.

Let's be together forever. No walls. No gates. No responsibilities.

"Would you ever kill me, Dorothy?"

"W-what, 'cause I'm crazy or something?"

"No. Just... I was thinking about _Romeo and Juliet_." It was an easy lie.

The well-rehearsed ones were.

"About how it would've been so much easier if it'd been a murder-suicide pact instead of what happened."

"I guess I would. But I'd follow you right after. What would be the point, really? Being apart is... It's terrible." I wanted to sob. To weep into her chest and tell her: See? There? Don't you see? You _are_ getting better. After six years, you **really** are getting better saying something like that. "But it's only been a few months now."

And then she'd say something like that, and I knew I couldn't.

"Yeah. You're right, Dorothy."

"'course I'm right. I'm right about everything." I'd started to think she was.

"Would- could there ever be anything that'd make you hate me, Dorothy?"

"Why're you asking all these weird questions, Relena?" I didn't know why. I didn't. But I loved her nails' blunt tingling brush down my shoulders. Electric along my scalp with slow languid orbits.

"I don't know. I just- you might meet someone here, and-"

"Never. Really. There's nothing. I just want to spend forever and ever with you, making you feel like a perfect fool, Princess. It's the reason I exist."

"Then get better, okay?" It was hard to banish desperation's edge from my voice. To make it playful and gentle.

"I promise."

"Really?"

"I love you." Hearing it was enough to have me almost bawling.

"I love you, too."

**Author's Note:**

> Well, wasn't that beautifully depressing?
> 
> I've never written these characters before, but this is still my favorite series and always will be. So there.


End file.
